Signs of Life & Hermeneutics
In the past week, I’ve been asked to help teach a course on hermeneutics and epistemology for a group of close-to-dying people at a church. I feel like I may not know what I’m talking about, but they may not either. My grandparents, who are about the age of the church members (one of them is dead), have taken “courses” similar to these, and the pastor at this church is sometimes a bit less skeptical than I am, and so I’m wondering if there’s anything I can say that might be skeptical but provocative and generative. I do not know that much.
So I read Dilthey and Schleiermacher and my former professor David Tabb Stewart and (problematically) Heidegger (who is quoted in the movie Call Me By Your Name, which I watched again last night, by the way), and, also, controversially, added Susan Sontag to the mix (who is what I like to call an “instagram-thinker”) to mark the shift from representation in a text towards the surface “erotics” of a text (or art). And I feel a bit jumbled. I do not think the old people care about this.
Susan Sontag, makes a call, predictably, in her essay Against Interpretation, against interpretation. I do not think she has read Dilthey, who, as far as I know, uses interpretation not as something purely representative, but as a way of differentiating objects of experience. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” she says. I think some people think that interpretation is cut off from feeling, or from senses or experience, when, for a lot of the hermeneuticians that I seem to be reading, experience is the goal of interpretation. Or, put in a way that might be totally wrong but sounds nice: interpretation takes us from our own experience into the world of others, so that we might see and hear and feel more according to the terms of those whose worlds differ from ours.
And as I’m thinking this, a gay in the coffee shop walks up, and asks me how I’m doing. “Eh, sort of ok,” I say, because I’m in this crisis of teaching hermeneutics at a church, supposedly, and do not know how religious I should be or not be. The coffee shop plays Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” The gay sees my stack of papers, and says, “Schleiermacher?” and I said, “Dilthey today, but Schleiermacher yesterday,” and we talk about teaching, and gay movies like Call Me By Your Name. And suddenly the barista walks in, the barista who is going to seminary right now, who, surprisingly to me and this gay man, is married to a woman and wanting to have a child. The gay man leans in close. “He is obsessed with musical theater,” he said. “You need to tell him what you’re reading. We need to get him out of the closet before he has a child; he has to see that a gay can do what he does.” And I tell him about my friend who has had closeted gay friends for years, who have all gotten married, until they all showed up, without their wives, to San Diego Pride with my friend and his husband, and then they had all confessed to being some sort of gay or bisexual. “Our wives would kill us if they knew what we were doing,” I imagine that they said. “It’s sort of like a Brokeback Mountain situation,” I said, and he said, “it just gets worse as time goes on, prolonging a false marriage.” The gay gets up to leave. “Hey,” he said. “Come to my party. You’ll like the people there. Bring your boyfriend too. It’ll be a good time with interesting people.” And I said, “okay,” and he said, “no seriously come,” and I said, “alright!” and then, “I’ll see you later.”
I have been sitting here waiting for the barista to come from the back. I have no intention of talking about Dithley or Schleiermacher with him, because honestly, I do not know enough about either of them. Nor do they seem very biblical to me. I am trying to fit this sort of philosophical knowledge back into a religious context so that I do not get crucified at a church. “A hairy leather bear,” is how the Queer Bible Commentary describes John the Baptist: maybe that’s worse than secular knowledge. I do not know.